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- Okay, so here's a big question for you. Do you remember the day when Slack just launched? They launched their beta. Do you remember the day when Snowflake launched? This is one of the most biggest blockbuster IPOs in SaaS history. Just happened just recently. Do you remember when they launched? 'Cause I don't either. You remember when Marketo launched? How about HubSpot? Remember when Salesforce launched? These are epic SaaS companies. But most of these companies didn't launch the way a lot of founders try to launch their SaaS businesses today. You see, when I talk to founders, I see two distinct ways that they approach launching. And a lot of times, the first time founders and I made the same mistake, approach it in a very linear way. Whereas the second time founders and experienced founders approach it in a very multi-threaded way. The thing is when we think about launching our SaaS businesses, when you're in that idea stage, and you're building it out and you're building the product and trying to get the features right, we think that there's this giant launch button that you hit and then boom! Everything goes crazy and everyone signs up and you're number one on Product Hunt and then from there, you just ride the wave. But the reality is that's not how it works. And we know this a second time founders and as third time founders. So we approach it totally differently. Where a Product Hunt launch or a Hacker News launch or an AppSumo launch, and I love those guys, is not really a launch strategy. So in this episode, having been in SaaS, having launched multiple products. Having products go nowhere and products be successful, here's what I've learned. And I'm gonna walk you through the three core principles that you absolutely need to know to make sure that you actually launch your SaaS business the right way. Intro. (upbeat music) What's up, everybody. Welcome to Unstoppable, I'm TK. And on this channel, sometimes, I'll wear a sweater because in Dallas, it's really cold right now. But also, I bring you an episode every single Sunday to help you grow your SaaS business faster. So if you're new to the channel, welcome. Be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. That way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy. Now, if you're already part of this growing community, which is growing faster and faster than ever before, if you are part of my coaching programs, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. Now, I remember when I was first getting out there and building companies. We thought that launch was a very linear approach. You would build a product and then you would launch. And you'd try to get this big bang. But as I tried to do this multiple times, I've had products fail, I've had products wildly succeed, I learned that there's no such thing as launch anymore. Especially today. If you look at some of the most successful companies, even by the time they might do a press announcement, they launched way before and in a very different and took a very different approach to launching. And so in this episode, I wanted to dig into exactly how to launch SaaS businesses the right way, because too often, I come across founders who are like, yeah, no, we're still building the product. And then we're gonna launch. I'm like, cool. Well, what does the launch look like? Well, we're gonna go on Product Hunt. Like, well, okay then what? And they don't really have an answer and they're waiting and they're waiting and they get stuck in this what I call the one-more feature trap. When they think that they just need this one more feature and then their product will be perfect. And then when they hit that giant launch button, then everyone's gonna love it. But even when I describe it, you know very well, you're a smart person that that doesn't work. Although, we still operate that way. And so I wanna dig into the three core principles you absolutely need to know so that you don't make the same mistakes that I did, that a lot of us have. And you actually launch your SaaS business the right way so that you can actually accelerate growth and get to revenues and then grow from there. So if you're excited digging, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. And let's go into principle number one. So principle number one is first, I wanna tell you what not to do. That's principle number one. Don't do a linear launch. Now here, what is a linear launch? A linear launch is where you essentially have an idea. You start with an idea and then you do a little bit of work on the market to validate it because everyone does that. We know enough that you shouldn't just build what you think should exist. You should validate it. So you'd do a little bit of market research. And then you actually get to coding and then you are coding and maybe you show it to a couple of friends and then you code some more. And then you basically say, okay, and then we launch. And launch could be where you start hiring a sales person. You hire a content person. You launch on Product Hunt, you do AppSumo deal, any one of these things. So this is what I call the linear model to launching. And this is what you don't wanna be doing. And there's a whole bunch of reasons on why you shouldn't do it and I'll get into it. But the biggest problem with this is you think of this as you first build a product and then you go to market. You take it to the market and then magic ensues. And as long as you get the features right in park ride, and your friends love it and you love it, that's gonna do awesome. And you keep delaying this launch because you're like, no, we still need those two features and that's super important. And then once we do that, there's almost this like wall over here, where then you say, cool, let's go hire the sales person. They'll close the deals. Let's go hire the marketing person. They'll get content going and SEO going. Let's maybe be or some people might say, well, I'll be founder-led. So I'll do the selling now. And maybe your co-founder is more of the sales and marketing person. They're like, then I'll get to work once you build the product. And that's kind of principle number one is don't do a linear launch because when you do this, you're essentially building on a bunch of assumptions that have not been proven yet. And the reason these two models exist, this multi-threaded model exists versus the linear model is because enough of us founders have gotten burned by following this model. Because it's very natural to follow. We're like, well, let's go build a product. We don't have a product. What are we gonna sell? And what are we gonna talk to customers about? who knows if they're telling their truth until we ask for money? These are all true. So logically, it makes sense to follow the linear launch model. But what ends up happening is you essentially fall into this zone where you keep adding more features, adding more features and you fall into the one more feature trap. And essentially, you keep pushing off launch and you keep investing more without actually validating with the market what's going on. Now, Eric Reese came around in the early 2010s. He was an investor at ToutApp. So I loved his book. We gave it to our employees, incredible model of, hey, let's build a minimum viable product and then let's get this out there and then let's keep iterating. And that wasn't really good idea but at the end of the day, people still couldn't agree on the definition of a minimum viable product. Like what are the features that go into a minimum viable product and our people not liking it because we don't have the minimum viable product. And interestingly enough, although MVP is a tried and true concept, people still got stock on what is an MVP and then got stuck here and stayed in this linear launch model. And that's essentially where you don't wanna be. And the whole reason I wanted to start here is first, I wanted to justify the fact that if you're doing this, I talked to a lot of founders even today that still do this, I've done this. It's perfectly logical. It's perfectly natural. It's also kinda easier to do because you're like, well, let's just get the product right and then we'll figure it out. And it also puts off the things that maybe you don't enjoy doing as much like marketing or selling, but at the end of the day, this is the wrong way to do it. So principle number one is don't do the linear launch model, essentially. So if you're like RTK, I shouldn't do linear launch model. What do I do? How do I do this? And the biggest thing I could tell you is number the principle number two, you actually wanna run a very multi-threaded model. And if you're a startup founder, you should know what multi-threaded is. Instead of the computer using one thread to compute things, you have multiple threads and you're working on multiple things at once, which may sound obvious, but not everyone does it. And also it's a little counterintuitive because a lot of VCs and investors will constantly tell like, no, you gotta focus, you gotta focus, you gotta focus. You gotta get this right. And that's also true. And this is one of the tough things about being a founder, multiple things can be true. And what will work for you is finding the right balance between those truths. If you try to stay in the extremes and just follow the common advice, then things won't work for you. Everything's very nuanced. And there are a lot of gurus out there like, well, you gotta do this. It's like, well, no, it depends. It really depends. This is one of the things that we do in my coaching programs, where we really dig into like, okay, well, what are the nuanced things here? And what would we do? And based on my experience, what would I do? And based on your domain knowledge, what would you do? And let's call us on what the right strategy is. On one hand, you wanna focus but on the other hand, you actually wanna be multi-threaded in how you approach your launch. And the best way to think about this is instead of having this linear approach of just one thread that's running you through the product, you get the MVP right and then you launch, what you actually wanna do is essentially run two threads. The first thread is what you are naturally inclined to do as a startup founder. If you're an engineer or you are mostly engineering driven, this is what we tend to do. I'm an engineer also. You essentially are building the product. This is thread number one. Now, in the linear model, you're essentially building, building, building, and waiting to launch and trying to get the MVP right and then you go for this launch, doing a Product Hunt thing and an AppSumo thing. And the biggest problem with this is when you think about mapping out what your user graph or your revenue graph, or your active user graph looks like, you essentially stay flat and then you hit this giant spike, and then it goes like this again. And then you have to figure out what you need to do next. There are some companies that just blow up but that's actually very rare. For most of them, you'll see a giant spike. You'll get a bunch of users that aren't quite your ideal customers. And they come with a bunch of complaints. Maybe you do this like lifetime deal. Although like, what is recurring revenue business if you do a lifetime deal? And essentially, the chart looks like this. Giant spike, bunch of noise, and then back to nothing, and then it dwindles away and now you're like, what do I do? And then you're like, I know if we just add this one more feature and then we launch again, then we're gonna be awesome. And you fall into that trap. Now the alternative is to be multi-threaded on this and saying, okay, one thread is to continuously build the product. And even when there is no product, we are also going to essentially have a thread that thinks about building go-to market. And this is kind of the big aha. A lot of people essentially think about, well, we'll do go to market. We'll do sales, we'll do market once we have a great product, but the reality is, if you actually build out your go-to market, then you will have a better product. Meaning the more people you're bringing into your world and you're talking to, and they're trying out even the crappiest version of your product and giving you feedback, the better off you're going to be in actually having a proper product and actually honing in on the right product. Otherwise, you're building, building, building based on a bunch of assumptions. And there's a certain way to do this. You might be asking, well, first of all, like, Hey TK, if we don't have a product, like what are we doing? What are we selling them? What are we marketing? Why should we do it? How do we do it? And it's easy. Like the first thing you can do in this thread is actually build a mailing list. And the fancy people will say audience, which is pretty much the thing. You can build an audience. You can build a mailing list. Essentially, what you're looking to do is build an engaged group of people that are not excited necessarily about the product, but are excited about the problem space you're in. So for example, before I started Tout App, I was working on, so Tout App happened very quickly. But I was already building a mailing list of people that wanted to use tools, we wanted to use productivity tools 'cause I was playing around with different productivity tools. And I had a lot of founders and I had a bunch of salespeople, marketing people, like it was a good group. And so I was already building a mailing list and an audience through my blogs or my mailing list just by telling the story. And because of that, I was able to continuously talk to these people, give them early versions of all the different types of products that I was building. And essentially, I was able to do both these things at once. And it allowed me to build a better product. Another way you can be doing go-to market early is you could also be doing building what they say now building in public. A lot of companies do stealth. You build in public. Meaning you get on Twitter and you start sharing like, hey, I'm building this. Here's the problem solving. Here's what happened this week. You're essentially sharing your journey. And that way, you start to build an audience of people that are interested in that journey, interested in that product and can start to give you interesting insights and you can actually pull them. You can show them the product, you can demo the product, get them early in like obscene alpha and get their feedback. What you're essentially doing is getting more interactions going into your product instead of waiting for one giant launch. What we're also not doing is building a bunch of features under the assumption that it's the right set of features. You're actually stress testing it with this audience that you're building. And the other thing you're doing is there's no big fat impending date of a launch. And until that nothing, you're actually getting little by little more and more people into the product and seeing what they do with it. So you can actually iterate on it and tweak on it. And little by little, you get bigger and bigger and bigger. The other thing that's super powerful and different about multi-threaded is you're no longer doing this one big launch. You're not doing that because those just don't work. You get this giant spike and then it falls. And the big problem is you get a lot of data here, but with all that data, you actually don't know what it means. If 50 people complain about a certain feature, but they would never use a software like this or not in your ICP, you're like, well, what do I do with that? It's too much noise. But in this kinda scenario, the biggest difference is you're actually doing multiple mini launches. And this is super powerful. And the meaning behind this is there's no big bang launch. What you're really doing is a little by little as you're building this audience, little by little, you're letting more people into the product. As you're building and public, little by little more people are engaging with the trial maybe that you've put out there on like, hey, maybe join the wait list or join my mailing list. And I'll give you a secret invited to try out the product. Little by little, you're adding more and more people into the product. And what that does is you're being selective about who you're letting in. And you're really understanding what they do in the product. What features they use, are they activating? Are they actually doing the right things in it? And when you're doing that, you're actually starting to get a better understanding of what you're building and if it's actually providing value. And you can actually like call them or email them. In Tout App in the early days, whenever someone clicked on an upsell link but didn't convert or they checked out a certain feature that was building and I didn't know quite how to get it right, I would monitor that and I would send them an email saying, hey, I saw you check this product, would you mind getting on a quick call with me? I just have a few questions. It would mean the world to me. And I'll give you an extra three months. 'Cause at that point, data from qualified users was more important. And the biggest thing about this is when you do these multiple mini launches and you parallelize, essentially you're building of product and your go-to market instead of waiting for the go-to market to come later. What you're essentially doing here is little by little increasing your user base and little by little, getting better and better about what your product is. And you're learning more about what your ICP is. You're learning more about what features are used. You just make decisions on the product. Like essentially, this is feeding into this and this is feeding into this. Meaning the better your product gets, the more people are happy and they'll tell other people and you get more go-to market and more people in your audience and the better your audience gets. And the more people you get, the more we'll go into the product and it just gets better and better and better. And essentially, you're doing a multiple mini launches. And the beauty of this is it doesn't mean you can't launch on Product Hunt. What it means is that you can launch later on. What it means that maybe you don't need Product Hunt. You just know exactly who your customers are. And you have a massive mailing list and you keep opening up more of the waiting list. What it may mean is now, you know exactly how to position your product. You know what the features are so you can run ads because you've got revenue generating. And the big difference here is you never fall into this one more feature trap, and you never fall into this like scary launch. And you never offload like, hey, we'll just figure it out. That marketing and sales stuff later. You build it into the DNA of your company and you iteratively get better and better and better. And if you were to compare this graph, essentially, what the graph for the users or active users or revenue will look like is there'll be like little wiggles. And then over time, it'll just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it'll take off. And the reason for this is every single mini launch that you're doing will essentially increase your likelihood of success. More users will come in, you'll nail in the features. And even if the products are not fully ready yet, you're giving it as a trial. You're giving it as a six-month trial maybe, or you may be pre-selling of whatever it may be, people are gonna be more engaged because people love being part of something early and special. And they know it's like almost like special access. And little by little you're getting them in and you're giving them the white glove service, you're doing all the unscalable things necessary to really understand who these users are, what features they need, how do you solve the problem? What's the most important problem? How much are they saving in terms of money and time so you can know how to price it. All these things come together. And instead of this one giant spike and then a huge drop, which is what happens with this linear strategy. With this multi-threaded strategy, you keep building better product and keep building better go-to market. And it gets better and better and better and better and better. And this like goes into one of the core mantras that I have on this channel. Like as a startup founder, especially as an early stage one, you essentially have two levers. You either shipping code or you're closing deals. Shipping code, closing deals. Those are the two levers. And you're able to operate both those levers. In the linear model, you're just shipping code, shipping code, shipping code. You're not closing any deals and you don't even know what you're doing. With this, you ship some code, you can close some deals. You close some deals, you ship some better code and it just get better and better and better. And over time, you start to actually take off. And maybe like, who knows? At this point you can say, you know what? Lets us do a giant press release, except you're not coming out with, oh my God, check out this tiny tool, we just got hunted. And then nothing happens. It's like, hey, we have this many users, we're growing. This is what we solve. And we're going to the moon. And there might be a more interesting way to get discovered that way. Or maybe you don't need the PR 'cause who cares? You can actually feed the money you're generating into ads. Or you can feed the money into outbound. You can feed the money into SEO or better content, or just get your audience to refer more people. And then you can start to grow on that. And then you can raise your next round and then do a press release around that. Now does that mean you won't do a big launch where you say we're so excited to launch. And I'm so proud. It's like, yeah, but who cares? Who cares about this giant spike of users that you didn't want any way with no data, no learnings. And now you don't know what to do, except you think you need to build another feature because they're angry users. 'Cause that's what they are. There's a whole group of people on the internet and they just love trying new tools and shitting on them. Like that's it. That's all they like to do. And that's what you get with the linear model. Whereas with this, you really hone in on who your real users are and you start to move forward. Now, I have this third principle that I wanna hone this, like kinda tie this together. But before I do that, let me pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? Are you starting to see the power of if you do a multi-threaded launch, we just don't put up go-to market, you start to do the two lever, ship code, close deals. You will actually get to a better product and your revenue is faster and you'll build the right product and you'll do (mumbles). It starts with the power. And can I just get a yes in the comments below? Also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It really likes it when you do that. Also I have a Five-point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. It's completely free. If you're in this stage where you're figuring out what is my strategy to win? What's my market, my ICP, all that stuff. Go to getunstoppable.com/strategy. I'll link to it below, but let's go to principle number three. This multi-threaded launch is actually a strategy that is behind a lot of the popular things, but people will do them without doing them right 'cause they don't understand the principles behind them. But now you do. The popular things is principle number three. The popular things right now is building in public. Essentially, that's what a multi-threaded launch is. You're building in public, meaning you're getting your go-to market, getting the word out while you're building the product instead of waiting. Another macro trend is community first. Community first businesses where you build a community first and then you build the product. And that's what multi-threaded is. As you're building a product, you build a community and out of that community, comes your first set of users and that community grows and then your user grows and your revenues goes faster. And the last thing is the other big macro trend is product-led growth. And this is also super interesting because a big function of product-led growth in the early stages is to make the product easy to get into and spread. And what you're essentially doing is instead of building, building, building, as early as possible, you get people into the product and get them to spread it. And then you get those users to tell you how to actually build a product instead of doing a giant launch. Giant launch, believe it or not, is more of a traditional marketing model. Whereas a product led model is to just get people into it and see how they do, track those metrics and kind of iterate from there. And so all these things we talk about that you should do, people kinda do them on a surface level without truly understanding what it really is and what you're really doing is a multi-threaded launch instead of a linear launch. And so if you're in that early stage, you in the pre-revenue stage and you're building out your product, you need to ask yourself. Am I doing a linear launch or am I doing a multi-threaded launch? Another easy way to say this, am I putting off my go-to market thinking I know best on how to build a product? Or am I actually thinking about building the product shipping code and also closing deals? I'm building up the go-to market. Is it harder? Yes. Is it more effective? Absolutely. Are you more likely to fail if you follow the linear launch model? 110%. This is why you see a lot of companies that are stealth and then they raise millions of dollars and they build this thing in a dark room and then you never hear from them again. Whereas the companies that actually build the product and build the go-to market and keep iterating and this feeds off of each other and then track the right metrics, everything comes together really, really, really, really well. So that's what I had for you today. Now, if you're in this stage, now you know exactly how to think about this multi-faceted launch. What you may not know is, well, how should I think about this go-to market? How do you flush that out? This is why I have my Five-point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. It's never too early to flush out your go-to market. And so go ahead and download my Five-point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. It's completely free. Just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy. getunstoppable.com/strategy when you download that guide. It's really awesome because it walks you through what are the key pieces you think through. Here are reference videos on my YouTube channel that you should watch. You can summarize it all in a one-page template I have for your strategy and that will help you get started on this second thread. So if you're stuck in this linear launch thread and you're like, I need to get to two threads, but how do I kick off the second thread? I already know how to build a product. Then just go down with that guide, they'll tell you what to do. Just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy. Also link to it below. Now, if you got value from this video, please smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm. Loves it when you do that. If you're part of a WhatsApp group, a Slack group, a community of other founders and they would get value from this video, please share it with them. We put a lot of love into these videos. So it'll mean the world to me and my team. Also, if you haven't subscribed, I drop a video like this every Sunday with actionable strategies and how to grow your SaaS business faster. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. You'll get notified every single time I drop an episode like this. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK. I'll see you in the next episode. (dramatic music)